Susskins Central Dispatch

Bring a bucket.

The Byetta is proceeding nicely. I’ve been on 10 micrograms twice daily for about two weeks.

The nausea is starting to subside now.

I had almost no side effects from the initial lower dose. A tiny bit of nausea, and nothing else. The current dose had me very uncomfortable a couple of nights. About an hour or two after dinner, I’d go queasy and stay that way for a couple more hours. Blerg.

I can influence it. For instance, greasy food makes for stronger nausea. Too much food makes for stronger nausea. Laying still makes for stronger nausea. Eating immediately after the injection makes it a bit stronger.

On the other side, lighter meals help, light snacks help, water helps, and waiting ten minutes helps a tiny bit.

Seriously, this is not a major problem for me. Not particularly fun, but I can muscle my way through it. And I’m also finding that the effects are slowly receding as I get used to the stuff. I figure that in a couple of months I’ll have no more trouble. And what nausea I have seems light to what women go through during pregnancy. So I can take it.

Piece of cake. (Urp.)

Like those big-eyed kids on black velvet.

Had my yearly eye check, looking for diabetes-related damage. Passed. I get to see for another year.

Seriously, I keep my glucose levels pretty good, so there is no damage in my eyes. Bad glucose management leads to constricted capillaries, which leads to reduced blood flow, which the body compensates for by building lots more capillaries. So the retina (that blood-filled back panel on the eye, the one that produces red eye in flash photography,) starts to build little forests of capillaries to compensate. Eventually such forests start to degrade vision.

I’m having none of it. These are the only two eyes I get. I’m taking care of them.

Back to my original point. Had my yearly check, which of course involves the magic dilation fluid, which produces pupils the size of dimes for hours. The world is a glowy place when one’s eyes are open like manholes.

Sudden topic change. Want to read a really appalling joke designed to anger every woman alive? Women, you’ve been warned.

(more…)

I’m reasonably certain gnomes are involved.

Over night the phones started working again. No more problems. Creepy.

On the other hand, that’s a standard tactic for technical support. If you ignore the problem, it will suddenly right itself.

This explains the maddening tendency for help desks to disconnect you. They’re trying to force the issue to spontaneously correct without their intervention.

Miss Tomlin on the wire.

Stupid phones aren’t working properly. When people call in, the phone rings once or twice, and then disconnects them. They get a busy signal.

Qwest is coming out tomorrow morning. Dammit.

Hook up the electrodes.

My iMac lives!

Only took from 6:45 until 11:00 last night to get the base system rebuilt. Hardest part? Physically replacing the hard drive. While the iMac is beautifully engineered, it’s a tight fit. Takes a bit of finessing to get everything apart/together. The G4 iMac is not built for home repairs. Thank goodness I had a set of Torx drivers.

The OS was relatively trouble-free, though I did have a couple of problem spots that weren’t completely intuitive. Had to launch a separate hard drive utility to do the initial partitioning, and then had to reboot to get the OS X installer to use it. Other than that, it was launch and watch.

Oh, I had a bit of a tussle with the networking too. Took a while to find the spot where I could instruct it to grab settings from our router. Once I did that, it worked fine.

So Miss Ophelia is back from the dead. Still have to locate my iLife software disc so that I can update iPhoto and the like. But that’s trivial.

The clickety-click-click of Death.

Got up Saturday morning and heard a regular clicking noise coming out of Fred’s computer room. Computers + clicking = uh oh.

Sure enough, Ophelia the iMac was making the dread hard-drive-fall-down-go-boom noise. Dammit. The hard drive has died completely, along with all the data on it.

Okay, not surprising. She’s been on constantly for nearly five years. She’s one of the G4 luxo lamp iMacs, the one that looks like a half-basketball with a silver neck coming out of the top. And she’s worked hard for a long time.

Of late, her only two jobs were to grab the KQ Morning show via the RadioSHARK and to maintain our digital photos. I’ve been a bit neglectful of backing up the photos, so we’ve lost everything we took in 2007. But aside from my Mom’s birthday party, we hadn’t taken much. And I can get the birthday photos back, because a. I posted the whole lot on my Mac website and b. I made a copy of them all and gave them to Wayne. So those can be brought back without much hassle.

And all the older stuff is safely tucked away on Rutger, my Windows machine.

So I went and bought a new hard drive for the old girl this morning, and will resurrect her tonight. Because, frankly, the RadioSHARK software for Windows sucks dead mules.

Ophelia! Come back to me, girl!

There’s nothing quite as nice as sleeping on the couch with Spongebob on the television.

I’m sure of it.